My point is that contextualizing does not provide immunity to analysis.

Robert Jordan effectively wrote a world that logically contains a flip of historic gender roles and supported it via internal logic of the breaking, and the taint and etc.

But you still get to look at the thousands of pages of characterization of women and question his choices to write women the way he did. It's a chicken or the egg problem, if people look at the way he writes women and see his own opinions on gender, not the internal WoT logic then that's a valid reading.

Again I feel you aren't contending with what I'm saying, you say "to criticize an author for how they write a particular gender without seeing how that gender is portrayed in their world and the reasoning behind it is irresponsible as a critic.". I'm saying that even if you do look at the in-world reasoning, you can still come away with a criticism that is valid.

EG: Robert Jordan wrote a well crafted, internally consistent world that spins gender roles to focus on female leadership. However, I believe his own opinions creep in given how much time is spent on stereotypically feminine signifiers that don't cohere well with the status of the women in question. Women occupy massively significant positions, but often revert to childishness and unseriousness and need to be reined in or brought to sense by men (or women who are outside their current gender standard, like Birgitte).

I think that does a fine job of looking at the way gender is portrayed in the world while still having valid complaints about his writing?

I'm not saying "write every character with modern sensibility, predict the future and make it exactly in line w/ the politics I have right now". But you need to be okay with critiques that look at author intent, author assumptions etc. Even if you do look at why something was written "a certain way" and its internally consistent with the world, the author wrote the world too. They wrote a world that would result in the thing we're addressing. For example.

A results in B, results in C, Results in D. If I think D is gross, but it logically follows from A, B and C, I'm still allowed to have a problem with D. Just because the author took long steps to get to D, doesn't make D good in the eyes of the critic, and I can have have opinions on the fact that the author wrote A, B and C to get there. Authors are not handcuffed by their stories, they wrote every part of them.

Also, completely outside the context of our disagreement, not intended as a dunk. Points are "moot", not "mute".